By the time you read this, Town Meeting will have come and gone, but maybe not the drama.
Below are some timely musings and some I have had on the shelf since the end of March awaiting space in the Current.
Board of Assessors have dug us a $561,000 hole
On August 18, the Board of Assessors completed their work to “get it right,” in their words, with the mailing of their real estate tax abatement decisions. Of the 334 abatement requests, about 80%, or 267, were approved. Unfortunately, “getting it right” cost the Town $561,000 — $541,000 in reduced tax revenues plus $15,000 for outside services from Patriot Properties and $5,000 for Doherty consulting services. The granted abatements imply an average reduction of $225,970 in property assessment and $2,024 in tax at our tax rate of $8.96. (More than 100% more than my guesstimate in my last column.) These abatements clearly benefited higher-end properties.
There is no plan at this time to recoup the lost revenues. One wonders if there were any discussions with the Finance Department before theBoard of Assessors started their reviews. So how will this egregious error be funded? At the April 24 Select Board meeting John Kelley, BoA chair, casually mentioned that the BoA’s “overlay surplus” would be used. However, even he admitted that the money “could have gone to much better things.”
I would guess that Karen Bertolino, our on-leave town assessor whom John threw under an MBTA bus for this error won’t be coming back. That is unless a soon-to-be-completed autopsy report points a finger in a different direction. I hope that report will be released to the public.
It’s hard to believe that this amount of money is allowed to accumulate. I wonder where we have been squirreling away money in other overfunded reserve accounts that could be used elsewhere?
Delegation – a School Committee problem?
After their lengthy budget presentation on March 21, at around 10 p.m., the SC spent nearly 20 minutes discussing and voting on student field trip proposals. Why can’t the SC delegate this to the super or school principals? The SC should ask the super to develop an approval checklist. Then leave it up to them to approve or disapprove.
In their April 24 meeting, the entire SC spent over 20 minutes in a group copy edit session on a communication survey. They discussed changing “we’ve” to “we have”, “a” to “one or two” or “an”, capitalization rules, word choices, etc.
I wonder what other opportunities exist for SC delegation. The SC should be spending their time on more important things like defining what is a “model school district.”
Delegate the flag policy to the students
And speaking of delegation, why can’t the students develop a flag policy proposal? Students should be tasked with creating a policy framework itemizing the elements that the policy should address. This would include eligible/ineligible groups, flag location(s), flag size, display time limits, approval procedures, approver, etc.
With this framework, they would research what other towns are doing. From there they would propose a policy for approval. The students would “own” it. The project would be an invaluable educational opportunity that would serve the students well.
Transfer Station project — yet another ding letter?
Seeing the Current’s April 11 headline “Transfer Station receives zero general contractor bids” I couldn’t help but think. Here is another case of someone not wanting to do business with Marblehead. Consider some recent history:
Dec. 21, 2023 — School Committee Chair Sarah Fox said the law firm Stoneman, Chandler & Miller was dropping the committee as a client.
Jan. 2, 2024 — Interim Superintendent Theresa McGuinness announces she no longer wants to stay in Marblehead and become the district’s permanent leader.
Jan. 5-March 22 — Michelle Cresta, assistant superintendent of finance and operations; Hope Doran, Glover school principal; and Amanda Murphy, Village School principal; announce they are leaving Marblehead for other school districts.
As of this writing we are still waiting for Public Health Director Andrew Petty to find out why general contractors did not bid on the Transfer Station project. Hopefully, he can get this over-due project finally completed.
“Schools” vs. “town” — “them” vs. “us”
Our budget documents are labeled as either “schools” or “town.” What is in the school budget is fairly obvious. In the town budget is almost everything else — the Select Board, police, fire, highway, heath, engineering, building inspection, etc. The problem is that people are starting to use terms like “us” and “them” when referring to one of these two groups. We are all residents of the TOWN of Marblehead — even the schools. We need to change the term “town” in our budget documents and organization charts. I will muse about this some more. Maybe we should run a contest!
Stay tuned for possibly more musings after Town Meeting.
James (Seamus) Hourihan was born in Marblehead and is a MHS graduate. For 35 years, he worked in finance, marketing and executive management roles at high-tech companies. He has lived here full-time since 2009.
